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Happy New Year, I hope you all had a great 2012 and are having an amazing start to 2013. On the Planetside 2 we had a pretty **** fantastic 2012, but we're looking forward to even bigger and better things in 2013! I've said before that while 2012 was the year that Planetside 2 launched, 2013 is the year when we're opening up the afterburners and aiming for the stars. After a well earned rest the team is energized and ready to get back to "kicking *** and fixing bugs. And we're all ou--" er, oh yeah, okay, we've still got some bugs to fix.

While we were out we were still paying attention to the forums as well as twitter, reddit, facebook and all the other places you guys interact with us; we've heard a lot of your excellent feedback, ideas, concerns and consternation. One of the biggest goals of our team has been and continues to be listening to our community and following YOUR direction for what this game needs to become. We're going to be talking a lot more about this philosophy in the coming weeks and how community involvement is going to directly impact our development schedule & priorities as we reveal "our" plan for the next 6 months. For now, we wanted to address some of the biggest issues we're seeing come up over and over again, so that's what we're focused on for January's update.

Game development can be messy and there is always the possibility that something from this list may slip or not pass QA, and more details will be released on the specifics of all of these items as we get closer to the patch date, but I wanted to get this info out to all of you as soon as possible, so with that in mind, here are some highlights from what the team is working on finishing up for LU02 which will be released on 1/30/13.

General performance increases, particularly for lower end GPUs

Experience (XP) system enhancements:

Dynamic XP system for player kills, players who have more kills are worth more XP. Freshly spawned players will be worth a fraction of the current kill reward.

Partial damage XP for dealing damage to vehicles that you don't end up killing

Population XP / Resource bonus moved over to continent population instead of global

Better display of XP sources for things like defensive bonuses & population bonuses

Rebalancing of XP rewards to help support tasks

Server transfer token available in Depot

UI changes to emphasize score per minute as a primary metric of player comparison

Short period of invulnerability will be added to freshly spawned / revived players - breaks upon game actions such as entering a vehicle or using a weapon.

Dynamic / player configurable colors for minimap & overhead indicators for enemies, friendlies, and squads within a platoon

New Hot Spot system that displays where active fights are occurring on the map

New spawn buildings with more exits, protected balconies and easy roof access to make them less campable.

Tunnel systems for amp and tech facilities to give access from spawn rooms to interior of bases and base walls without having to go above ground.

Making MAXes render more reliably at long distances for players in vehicles

AA improvements, notably flak changes for turrets and skyguards, giving them some better ability to aim, although not drastically impacting their DPS.

Fixes to missiles so that they more reliably detonate and actually blow stuff up

Air vehicle weapon tweaks

Increases to reload speed for certain HE ground vehicle weapons

And of course... lots of bug fixes
Whew, it's going to be a busy month! We know this doesn't address every issue that's been brought up recently but we hope it knocks out some of the big ones. Hopefully you will see from this update (and the feature plan for the next 6 months, when that is revealed) that we're taking your feedback and concerns for the game very seriously. We're here, we're listening and we're committed to continue to work with our community to build the best online game the world has ever seen.
As always, your feedback is very welcomed, here, on reddit, on twitter and everywhere else you may find us.
Cya on Auraxis!
-
Matthew Higby
Creative Director - Planetside 2
@mhigby

Meh, it's okay I guess. I'll probably play a few days to try it. But it fails to address many problems.

Even if spawns are less campable, bases are still poorly designed. This is especially true for minor outposts. I do like the addition of tunnels, though, and tank/aircraft nerfs are always good.

Really dumb that they bended to the will of Buzzcutpsycho in just flat nerfing kill EXP for everyone, even infantry players. I laughed at the "tweaks" to support exp also, support already gets a ton of exp. The entire game will be engineer/medics just trying to farm exp because kills will give you none. If there's one thing the game DIDN'T need, it's lowering the rate of cert gain even more.

SMG's are just a moneygrabbing addition though. You know what an "SMG" in gaming terms is in PS2? A carbine. The last thing this game needs is more boring automatic weapons that effectively serve the same purpose, but I guess Higby needs his paycheck.

Well nice less vehicle kills and more infantry to infantry combat. Love the tunnel idea. Now some tunnels at outpost and towers would be great as well. Let the above ground be what it should be for, vehicle vs vehicle.